Israel's moon rover touches down in Orlando ahead of February launch

By Joey Roulette on Fri, Jan 18, 2019 at 8:17 pm

[
      {
        "name": "Ad - NativeInline - Injected",
        "component": "31267952",
        "insertPoint": "3",
        "requiredCountToDisplay": "5"
      },{
        "name": "Real 1 Player (r2) - Inline",
        "component": "31267951",
        "insertPoint": "2/3",
        "requiredCountToDisplay": "9"
      }
    ]

click to enlarge

Photo courtesy of SpaceIL

Locked in a custom shipping container, Beresheet is loaded onto a cargo plane at the Ben Gurion Airport in Israel for its flight to Orlando.

Israel is less than a month away from lofting its first rover to the moon from a Cape Canaveral launchpad. Today, ahead of SpaceX's double-payload mission in February, the little lunar lander named "Beresheet" arrived at the Orlando International Airport after an eight-hour flight from Israel.

"Shipping the spacecraft to the United States is the first stage of a complicated and historic journey to the moon," SpaceIL CEO Ido Anteby said in a press release.

Currently, Beresheet is quarantined in a custom-built, air conditioned shipping container in Orlando. The dishwasher-sized spacecraft will be carefully trucked to a payload processing facility in Cape Canaveral.

.@TeamSpaceIL's lunar lander arrived in Orlando this morning ahead of its mid-February launch on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral. pic.twitter.com/BegkIN4AwC
— Joey Roulette (@joroulette) January 18, 2019

"The transporting of Beresheet is a unique challenge since this is a once-in-a-lifetime mission and there is no backup plan – this spacecraft must arrive safely," Eyal Shitrit, Director of Logistics for Israeli Aerospace Industries, said.

SpaceIL, an Israel-based non-profit, and Israeli Aerospace Industries, a state-owned aerospace manufacturer, began working on Beresheet in 2013 with hopes to score a chunk of the $30 million from Google's Lunar X prize, a space competition that ended in early 2018 with no winner.

But SpaceIL persisted, scraping together funds and donations from wealthy figures like casino magnate and Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. The non-profit neared bankruptcy in 2017 trying to land its final chunks of funding for Beresheet.

click to enlarge

Photo courtesy of SpaceIL

Beresheet is loaded onto a truck at the Orlando International Airport on Friday morning.

Now, SpaceIL will watch SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carry Beresheet into space next month. SpaceX maintains a "mid-February" timeframe and hasn't set a specific launch date.

Speaking of The Big Cheese: Don't miss this Sunday's Wolf Moon. It'll be a blood moon, so you must refer to it as the Super Blood Wolf Moon.

Stay on top of Orlando news and views. Sign up for our weekly Headlines newsletter.